We’re very excited to be able to announce the first version of the Flutter Inspector for IntelliJ and Android Studio! It will be featured in a talk at DartConf in LA (Wednesday, Jan. 24, 10am Pacific time) and will be live streamed on the DartConf website and on the Google Developers channel on Youtube. Be sure to watch it.

The inspector makes it much easier to understand why your application is rendering the way it does. It allows you to: View the UI structure of your app as a tree of widgets. Select a point on your device or simulator and find the corresponding Widget that rendered those pixels. View properties for individual widgets. Generally, better understand layout issues.
The inspector view can be opened via View > Tool Windows > Flutter Inspector (it shows content only when an app is running). To inspect a specific widget, select the ‘Toggle inspect mode’ action in the toolbar, then click on the desired widget on the phone or simulator. The widget will …

The M20 release of the Flutter plugin is now available! Fixes and improvements include:improved the "Open with Xcode..." logic to work better for plugin projectsimproved flutter run console filteringimprovements to unit test running supportbug fixes to project creation in order to properly respect custom creation options (such as target language)and, bug fixes to issues encountered when deleting projects
For existing users, Android Studio / IntelliJ should prompt you to update. If not, select 'Check for updates...' from the main menu. New users can install the plugin by selecting ‘Preferences’ > ‘Plugins’ and searching for ‘Flutter’ (or, see our install instructions).

Also available is the new package site, pub.dartlang.org, which now makes it easier to find Dart packages for use with Flutter.

Unless you're a member of the Dart misc
group, you may be missing Florian Loitsch's weekly newsletters, which
started in July. They live in the SDK repo (docs/newsletter),
but Florian also posts them in the misc group.
These newsletters cover the Dart language and some of the core libraries. Read
them to learn about existing features ("Did you know"), planned changes, and how
the Dart team considers and implements changes. For example:
The July
28 newsletter (the first) starts with some 1.24 language changes that you
might have missed: function types and changes to
void. It also talks about the unified front
end, and what that means for language changes. Finally, the letter
lists features in active development, such as zones that work
well with strong mode, void as a type, and changes to the
core libraries.The September
29 newsletter covers 1.x JSON encoding, and plans for
fixed-size integers.The October
13 newsletter covers 1.x double.toString methods and
planned …

IntelliJ EAP support
This month’s release now supports the public preview release of Intellij 2017.3. With this release, you’ll get a new version of the Dart plugin. That release includes features to help you better navigate and understand large build() methods, including things like showing synthetic text ‘closing labels’ at the end of nested constructors.
Android Studio support improvements
We’ve continued to work on our Android Studio integration (first available in the last month’s release). The fixes and improvements here include:
fixes to the language selector in the project wizard
fixes to the label on the project location directory picker
showing when a valid path is entered in the SDK field of the project wizard
displaying a warning when installing the plugin into canary builds of Android Studio 3.1
minor UI tweaks, like using consistent punctuation
Fit and Finish
We’ve also polished the plugin generally, and closed out many issues in:
the hot reload integration and r…

Tickets (for free) are available for DartConf Los Angeles on January 23 & 24th! In addition to hearing about Dart 2.0, you might also enjoy:Access to Dart, Flutter, and AngularDart engineers via office hours and unconference rooms.In-depth talks about Dart, Flutter, and AngularDart, including how the latter two overlap.Practical guides for Dart, Flutter, and AngularDart developers.Insight into what the teams are working on and how it will affect your projects.
You might also enjoy the average high temperatures in Los Angeles for January (68°F / 20°C).
Learn more and sign up at events.dartlang.org.We hope to see you there!

Android Studio supportYou can now install the Flutter plugin into Android Studio, and create, edit, and run your Flutter apps there. The plugin requires at least Android Studio 3.0 (currently at Android Studio 3.0 Preview beta 7). As this is the first Flutter plugin release to support Android Studio it should be considered beta; your feedback will help us improve the integration.

Improved support for developing and consuming Flutter pluginsFor this release we worked on improving the support for developing and consuming Flutter plugins. In addition to minor fixes and workflow improvements, we show referenced Flutter plugins in the ‘External Libraries’ part of the project view. From here, it’s easy to dig into the native iOS and Android implementations of a plugin, if desired. Reload on save is now the default behaviorThe ‘hot reload on save’ feature is now enabled by default. When running an app, hitting save or pressing the save keyboard shortcut will trigger a hot reload. Thanks for yo…

If you publish Dart packages or like to use early releases of the Dart SDK, the next few months are going to be interesting, as apps and packages adapt to the changes required by Dart 2.0. To make the process smoother, the pub tool that’s in Dart 2.0 pre-releases allows developers to download (and attempt to use) packages that don’t explicitly support Dart 2.0.
The upshot: Use a stable Dart SDK if you need reliability. Use a pre-release Dart 2.0 SDK if you’d like to test published packages with Dart 2.0. Report any issues you find to the package maintainer. If you publish packages, be careful about SDK constraints, and expect feedback from developers trying your packages with Dart 2.0.
The Dart 2.0 update page has all the details, but here’s an overview of what to expect, based on your development environment and the kind of code you write.
If you use Flutter: In the short term, your Flutter code isn’t affected. When Flutter updates its Dart SDK to a Dart 2.0 pre-release, the Flutter…

AngularDart v4 is now available. We've been busy since the release angular2
v3.1.0 in May. Not only did we "drop the 2", but we also improved the compiler
and tightened up the framework to give you smaller code, we updated the package
structure to improve usability, and we added several new features. Check out the
updated documentation to get
started.
Just angular
Upgrading to v4 will require more than updating your version constraint. The
package has changed names (back) to angular – dropping the 2.
You'll need to update your pubspec.yaml and the corresponding imports in your
code. In most instances, find-and-replace should do the trick. Going forward,
the package will be called package:angular. We'll just update the version
number.
Smaller code
The updated compiler in 4.0 allows type-based optimizations that not only
improve runtime performance but generate better code because we are able to
strongly type templates. A big result of the update is that many ap…

Hot reload on saveBy request, we now support doing a hot reload on file save. On an explicit save (cmd-s / ctrl-s or File > Save All), if there’s an app currently running we will try to reload changes into that app. This integrates well with how IntelliJ’s save action works — the default behavior of the action maps to a save-all command.

If there are analysis errors on save, instead of reloading we will highlight errors in the analysis view.

This behavior is off by default and can be turned on in Settings > Languages & Frameworks > Flutter. Feedback on this feature is much appreciated and will help us make additional improvements to the workflow. In particular, should we enable this feature by default? Improved project wizardWe’ve updated the new project wizard! You can now choose which type of Flutter project to create: an app, a plugin project – to expose native services, or a package – to create a reusable Dart library. In addition, you can choose between generating a project…